John Luther Adams – Become ...

 John Luther Adams, who has a won a Pulitzer price for music, likes to create pieces with a focus on nature. For his work on Become Ocean he also received a Grammy price in 2015.

When listening to Become Ocean, it felt like a nice blanket, wrapped around oneself to shield from everything around. For me it felt like the marriage of whale sounds and a classical symphony. It starts with very low and slow sounds, slowly joining together to create what one might understand as music. The first sounds seem to be more of nature’s kind whereas at one point the orchestra joins in and it involves into its own mix of both the natural and the synthetic, human made sounds.

While many human-made sounds tend to disrupt the beautiful calming ones of nature, for example cars drown out the sing song of birds, construction sounds make the wind rattling in the leaves of a tree disappear and children playing disrupt the splash of waves, in this case of Adam’s work, they form a symbiosis and create a coherent new piece.

In contrast to the calm sounds of Become Ocean, the piece Become Desert is much more tumultuous. It starts of with high chimes, which continue through the piece in which the orchestra seems to add more noise (at least in my personal opinion). While I would listen to Become Ocean to fall asleep, I wouldn’t do the same for the desert version. But when looking at the titles they seem to fit very well. The ocean itself is deep and tends to have a calming nature. It is cold and fresh and drowns. The desert is drier and hotter, higher and exposed to the air, making it brighter in nature.

So at least for me and those two pieces, the associations I make with the titles and the nature of the music do go together very well. I did enjoy the concept as well, as it would be something I will listen to in my free time as well. In contrast to other works we analyzed over the course, they did not provoke a headache from feedback, so that made it a lot better as well.